Creative musings in bright colors

Posts tagged ‘hearts’

This is so pink. SO PINK. It is too pink! I used a pink with a bit of glitter and added a pink with MORE glitter and then hearts. So, Valentine’s appropriate but it kinda made me cringe to wear it!

This was two thin coats of Mae by Zoya. It’s not a bad polish, two coats is great coverage…I just don’t love it. The glitter flakes are subtle and the shimmer has very little depth. It was an easy polish to wear, but if I want a shimmery pink I either want a lot of metallic depth or a glitter madhouse. I ended up gradienting on (mostly with dry-brush since trying to use a makeup sponge just transferred the darn glitters) Alegra by Zoya, which is a true deeper pink glitter polish, and one of my first ever Zoyas. I have to say, comparing Mae to Alegra, Mae just doesn’t measure up!

Of course I saw a heart stamp and figured my nails were already pink, so why not? And then the matching french tip stamps (I do rather love that this plate has both angled tip patterns and straight across tip patterns). SO MANY HEARTS. This is probably the most girly nail art I’ve worn this year.

Yet another two new things post! I am very excited that I have so much new nail polish, but it is also getting tiring swatching things as a focus rather than primarily doing nail art. I don’t know how those nail polish swatch bloggers do it!

Anyway, this is a shiny new polish from the OPI holiday collection, and was hands down my favorite OPI that I received (luckily, I even got a fully sized bottle rather than a mini!). The polish is called Feel the Chemis-tree, despite being a purple and in no way tree-like. OPI tends to have pun-y names, but this one misses the mark :-p. Anyway Chemis-tree covered well in two thin coats (I almost could have done one), and has a purple base with pink shimmer that shifts to gold. It is really quite beautiful!

On top of my purple base I did some layered stamping, and some simple stamps. The stamping images come from a plate sent to me to review from the Born Pretty Store, which I think was intended to be Valentine’s-themed but is mostly lots of flowers, cool lines, and hearts. But the best part? It is made to be layered! I have been waiting to get my hands on an intentionally layered stamping plate and this one does not disappoint.

I tested a few of the fine detailed lines from the flowers on this plate, and they all worked perfectly. Then I decided that I didn’t want to use flowers…and instead went with the heart with the small line made to go over it, and some larger lines. My sister thought I had used stamping tape (which with this design would have taken HOURS), I was so pleased!

This is the mani out of the 5 that I chose to post today in particular because it both has the MOST hearts, and is primarily pink so I figured it fit the theme best! But seriously, SOOO many hearts. Wow.

The base here is yet another new polish from the holiday sets that I won from Nail Polish Canada, and yet another Zoya! This is Kelsey, a bright pink with blue undertones. This polish manages to be a dark-toned neon, which is pretty darn cool. My camera freaked out. The polish also covers well in two thin coats…and I probably could have gotten away with one thick coat instead…Zoya has been killing it with the consistency of the cremes in this collection! I don’t even like pinks and this is an awesome color. And finish. And everything.

This is also another stamp that I’ve had for a while and just…never used. I chose to stamp with a pale grey rather than a white polish, and I regret that a little…I had to double stamp the flower design because the grey didn’t stand out as much as I wanted! Although I do think coloring in the flowers with a bright pink chunky glitter was awesome 🙂

This mani ended up being a lot of fun! There are no stereotypical Valentine’s colors, but there are hearts and it is somewhat elegant. Subverting tropes!

I wanted to see what a lace patterned stamp would look like over a magnetic polish, and I figured my copper/burgundy magnetic was perfect for Valentine’s Day! It also helped that I was sent the ideal stamping plate to review from the Born Pretty Store (I love lace stamps, and this plate is chock full of them), AND was sent two new magnets to play with!

For years, I have only had one, somewhat weak, wavy-patterned magnet to work with. Now, I have three! The one I am showing here is a simple diagonal line design, but it is very strong and the lines come through beautifully. I am so happy. This magnet is from the Born Pretty Store as well, and is listed as “N02”, on sale for $1.49. I should probably mention that it comes with a sticker over it with the pattern printed on it…that sticker is what holds the magnet to it’s positioning stick (so don’t remove it like I did or the magnet falls right out). Clearly, the magnet is strong enough to work through the sticker!

As mentioned above, I also love this stamp. The plate has a whole bunch of lace designs, and this one is entirely hearts! There are three large hearts (which mostly face in different directions from each other) so I used each of them on a nail, ergo all my nails are slightly different! I like it. I am also officially a fan of stamping lace over magnetic designs! The stamp is on sale right now for $2.99 over at the Born Pretty Store.

That’s all for today! My last heart-themed post will go up on Wednesday, and then we can move onto things like flowers and geometric patterns. :-p I also realized that due to my ridiculous backlog of posts, the actual post where this is a new polish hasn’t gone up yet! Whoops. At some point you’ll see this same base with a wavy design but suffice to say I wanted some multicolored magnet polishes and bought two Masuras….and they are (as expected) amazing. Sorry!

Another new polish and another Valentine’s themed mani! I actually struggled with this one, because it turns out that despite red being a key color for Valentine’s Day art, most of the things I ran into used it as a accent color not the base color! Regardless, I am happy with how this came out (even if the stamp was shallowly etched and so I had to double stamp each nail…yikes)!

I still have nightmares from the last time I used the gold glitter polish that I gradiented onto my tips, so I am not looking forward to removing this mani! But glitter makes everything better, so I don’t regret using it (….yet).

The base here is yet another of the new polishes that I received from Nail Polish Canada, this time from Essie. The polish is called Ring in the Bling…which is a bit of an odd name for a non-blingy polish. It covered well in two thin coats (I do love how pigmented most Essie polishes are!) and is a blue-leaning red metallic. It has a little bit of an inner glow finish that somehow leans orange. I don’t know how blue and orange combine to get a red polish, but here we are! I like it, but I have many similar colors and I personally tend to prefer deeper more jewel-toned metallic polishes.

Random strangers seemed to really like this particular design, I think because the glitter caught their eye! Nothing like blingly gold on red to get people staring at your fingertips :-p

That’s all for today! Happy Friday! I’ll have two more Valentine’s Day posts next week (Monday and Wednesday) before getting back to normal nail art. I am mostly just doing these posts because I can finally use the heart stamps that I otherwise find tacky the rest of the year! Hope you enjoyed!

The second of my Valentine’s Day manis (there will be 5 in total) features something near and dear to my heart: nerd culture. Mostly because I am a nerd. As is my husband (who is as I type this watching youtube videos of people playing various Zelda games…which he has already beaten. Repeatedly).

I wanted to combine two stamps from two different Bundle Monster plates, the nerd culture words (which feature such phrases as ‘trekkie,’ ‘jedi,’ ‘sherlockian,’ ‘whovian,’ ‘potter head,’ ‘sith,’ and my personal favorite ‘browncoats’). The other plate just has 8-bit hearts, much like you might get as lives in older video games.

The base polish here is another of the new polishes that I won from Nail Polish Canada, Blake from the new Zoya collection. I have to say, I don’t know that I would have picked out this polish for myself (it is a dark blue and I already own 6 or so dark blues) but I love it. It is a very deep midnight blue, almost black, which is opaque in two very thin coats. It also has a fine golden shimmer running through it, which makes it even more awesome.

Oddly, in the 21 polishes that I received from the nail art contest, 4 are dark blue! Additionally, 7 are purple. I always figured winter/holiday collections would go heavy on the red and green, but I only received two reds and no greens. Go figure!

Overall, I am pretty darn happy with how this came out! My poor white polish is beginning to truly dry out (and I cannot find it anywhere, my local Rite Aid stopped carrying the full line of Sinful Colors polishes!) so picking up some of the finer lines was…challenging. Regardless, I hope you enjoyed this ode to nerd culture!

In my head, the name of this mani is all Shakespeare-ified (Wing’ed Love) but I figured adding an apostrophe would confuse everyone…and I left it in normal English. Anyway, today starts my Valentine’s manis and I wanted to do something with birds!

Basically, I found this small stamp I had never used (despite owning the plate for years) and wanted to create a mani around it. That is the two doves image on my middle finger. I ended up using birds from 3 different stamping plates and leaves from a fourth. So. Many. Stamps!

This mani also uses the first of the polishes that I won from the Nail Polish Canada holiday nail art challenge! I ended up with 21 new polish (omg) about 2/3 of which I adore and 1/3 of which I would never have picked. This is one of the ones I would not have gone for. This is Once in a Blue Moon by ORLY, and is actually a nice pale blue-grey color, and is a two-coater which is great. However…it is also a frost. Can the nail polish community at large just agree to stop making frosty polishes? There are brush strokes all over the place and I would much rather see this as a shimmer or metallic, or even a creme. Also, I hate the ORLY brushes, they are far too wide for my poor pinky nail! All-in-all, I don’t know that I am going to try very hard to keep this particular color…it might end up going to my sister.

This is it, the final boring mani that I wore to interviews! Although if I am being honest, this one is not all that boring. It is also February which means I am permitted to start posting hearts (not that I have any other pink manis prepared…I spent the last few weeks wearing subtle pink and so I have been avoiding the color altogether. Can I make a blue Valentine’s mani???). Anyway, have some shimmer and some hearts!

I knew what I wanted to do with this mani, and trialled three different grey/grey combos before settling on this one. I am a little sad because the hearts take up so much space you can barely see the base! This only matters because the base is Crystal Crown, which I have just now realized was discontinued at some point in the past. This is awful because it is easily my most-used grey, and the bottle is half empty! Ooops. I need to keep a better eye on when indie polishes discontinue my favorites!

But anyway, this was basically advanced stamping with grey and white over grey. It looks rather nice for all that, and was suitably almost-subtle and heart-shaped!

Happy Friday! And this ends the run of boring manis. Now all I need to do is actually pick where I want to be next year (and for the next 10 or so years, yikes!) and get started on some actual Valentine’s manis!

So, following the theme of purple-and-white manis that were potential wedding manicures, we have the third runner-up! The base color is almost exactly the same shade as the bridesmaid’s dresses (and also the flowers), and I like the love theme!

Unfortunately, I think this looks a little juvenile. Maybe if I used creme polishes and not a holo base or something I’d like it a tad better, but I don’t have a creme burgandy-purple! I do like the tiny dark purple dots I added though :-p

My baby sister aka maid of honor wanted me to replicate these on her nails…despite never having seen them! She grabbed the same purple holo out of my extensive collection and then found this stamping plate and wanted it. Sadly, we ran out of time so she just ended up with purple nails, but it is amazing how similar we think!

Happy almost Valentines Day! I actually have some random pink or red manis left over that I just haven’t posted yet. but I’ll hold off using them next week so you can get the influx of hears and mush out of your systems :-p

This mani was inspired by @KAFig. I loved the gradient/lines/hearts idea!

My accent nails were made by stamping over a gradient and then coloring around the stamp. Maybe I should have done it as a decal, but I didn’t think about that till after! Oops. They still look pretty good.

Shiny! Metallic! Awesome! I got more compliments on this mani than most of my other recent ones. Go figure!

Yes, the title of the post is from a brothel in Firefly. I love that show…although this mani has nothing to do with it.

The art was inspired by a pinterest pin with the name “NailsByJennifer” but I can’t find a blog or anything! So, here is the pin but sorry I can’t give the actual link-back! I jazzed it up a little and used a holo gold polish.

To make the hearts, I actually painted them onto a stamper and then colored them in. I can’t paint free-hand hearts (especially with my non-dominant hand) so this was just easier.

Today’s challenge theme was “flag” and I really couldn’t think of anything more appropriate than the gay pride flag. I’m not the type of person to put a rainbow haze over my profile picture on Facebook, but I will show my support for the Supreme Court ruling on marriage equality through art!

So, here is my support flag! Also rainbows. This was totally free-handed, thus I can somewhat safely say that I can pull off straight lines at this point 🙂

Another nude mani! Unfortunately, I snapped the corner off my pinky the day I painted this, so I needed to put together something where my pinky would not stand out for being oddly shaped (apologizes in advance, the next few manis are probably also gonna have my oddly shaped pinky because I refuse to completely cut off my other nails). With that in mind, I put together a manicure that let me use the love words stamp from Bundle Monster, as well as a nude gold glitter and envelopes!

I have seen tons of envelope manis, and I wanted to try my hand at one. This might have gone a tiny bit better if I painted it with my dominant hand, but overall I like it! The only mistake? I made the envelopes upside-down for imaging! So most of the photos here have been manipulated (aka turned in one direction or another).

This manicure is basically one big thank you to Delphi, one of my readers. She noticed that back in December I tried to use my Bundle Monster plate 620 and it utterly failed. So, she kindly sent me hers!!! The nail art community is the BEST 😀

So, thanks to Delphi, I was able to use two of the images on plate 620 to create this manicure! In retrospect, putting silver over light purple was a bad idea. However, it stamped beautifully (even if you can hardly see it) and its appropriately Valentine’s themed!

I actually put this mani together back in early January, when I first got the plate…but I figured I would hold off posting it till the appropriate time. Aren’t the hearts adorable? Stitched hearts! Thanks again Delphi! 😀

I was wearing a red dress to my own engagement party right after Thanksgiving, so I needed to re-paint my nails to match. And to communicate love. Because that seemed like fun! (It did almost make me late to the party, but just almost :-D).

Really, this was just a bunch of stamps. Unfortunately, the one I was most excited about didn’t transfer! The new 2014 set from Bundle Monster has a plate with an EKG reading with a heart at the end of the T wave (yes, medical school means I can read EKGs…no, a normal EKG reading does not include an actual heart in the wave :-p) that I was super excited to use…and no luck! It partially transferred, but in order to make it wearable I stamped over it a second time with a grate pattern.

I love rhymey titles! Coral floral! I received these beautiful floral heart water decals from the Born Pretty Store and wanted to try them over tone-on-tone stamps (because these are the things I think about). It has been a while since I played with my coral polishes, and what better excuse than for the OMD Challenge coral day?

I have on two coats of a darker coral, stamped with light orange, and then I added my water decals. There are two types, a full circle (see the thumb) and a 3/4 circle (see my middle finger). Most of the ones on this mani are the 3/4 circle patterns that I cut up to place around my nail. These water decals were a delight to work with…thick enough to reposition (I replaced one of them 4 times without it wrinkling or ripping) but thin enough to disappear entirely under top coat.

Colors

Coral: Essie – Sunday Funday

Orange: Maybelline – Bleached in Peach

Stamp: BM – 314

I am really happy with how this mani came out! If you want your own cute heart-flower water decals, check out the Born Pretty Store. They are $2.86. Don’t forget to use my 10% off code, LY5X31!

In honor of the re-opening of Femme Fatale’s shop, I have for your viewing pleasure Bed of Roses* by Femme Fatale! This polish is a delightful mix of all types of glitter. There are predominately two colors: a dark green and a light green holo. Both greens come in tiny, medium, and large hexes, accentuated by pink flecks and red hearts.

In my hands, the hearts came out rarely. I got out three easily for placement on my accent nail and thumb, but no more came out when I was doing the rest of my nails. Since I don’t particularly care for heart glitter, this served me fine! Shown on most of my nails is one thin and easy coat of Bed of Roses. The base color is Visions of Love by OPI, a deep red creme. All the glitter is from Bed of Roses!

I adore the spread of glitter in this, and the tiny flecks of pink…just wonderful! I didn’t have to position or drag the polish, the glitter is very well suspended in the polish base. I have a hunch that with the full size bottle of glitter (I have a mini), it would be easier to get out the heart glitter if you desired to as well.

For my accent nails, I blobbed (technical term) some polish onto paper and pulled out each glitter piece to add to my nails and create a heart garden! Although it didn’t come out as I imagined, I’m glad I was able to show off the heart pieces. The photo below is just to show what happens in the sun, I couldn’t even get a decent photo because the glitters were so shiny!

Colors

Red: OPI – Visions of Love

Green glitter: Femme Fatale – Bed of Roses

Green: Essie – The More The Merrier

There are actually two other surprises to this mani, a new top coat (I’ll cover that topic soon) and a new base coat: Elmer’s glue! I love glitter polish but I HATE removing it (to the point that my glitters seldom get worn) so I wanted to try just painting on a PVC-based glue and seeing if the whole nail will peel away easily. Success! New way of applying and removing glitter polish. THIS IS EXCITING! I’ll cover how that works this weekend.

If you love this glittering green and red polish as much as I do, head over to Femme Fatale and pick up Bed of Roses for $10! Enjoy 🙂

* Product sent for review. All opinions contained within this post are my own.

My official Valentine’s Day manicure is suitably nerdy and also wonderful. One of my favorite webcomics is xkcd (in case you couldn’t tell from the banner at the side of my blog), and I have been wanting to do xkcd-themed nails for a while. Although this doesn’t quite count (I will still be doing stick figures at some point), these nails were inspired by my favorite individual comic from the series…Useless.

The point is that a nerd’s normal approach to life (math) is useless in the face of love. You can’t take the cosine of love, or use the identity matrix to figure it out. The derivative of love tells you nothing, and the square root of a heart is still a heart 😀

These were made using decals…which is to say since these are on my dominant hand, I actually painted them onto my stamper, peeled them off, and applied them to my nails. They are not perfect (either the writing or the application) but I think they are still adorable. Also, I matted them. Because…comics. Yah.

Colors

White: Zoya – Purity

Black: Sinful Colors – Black on Black

Red: OPI – All I Want For Christmas (is OPI)

I also have to say that the fine writing detail in this mani was only possible because my friend was curious if I could get finer lines by using a finer brush. And so he made me one. Its a modified protractor part with a single toothbrush hair stuck on the top (he assured me it was an UNUSED toothbrush). The verdict: oh yes, I can definitely do details with this brush! It’s a little unwieldy to hold, but for decals it is amazing. So thanks, David! I know you read this :-p

Happy Valentine’s Day! Go eat lots of chocolate, get flowers, or something. If you are single, get YOURSELF flowers. It is still awesome 😀

I wanted to do something new, something Valentine’s Day themed (because, as much as I am sick of pink and red and hearts, it is that time of year) that I hadn’t seen done for my entry into Polish Alcoholic and Luchessa‘s nail art contest. I was partially inspired by the new Incocco nail strips, partially by my desire to use all of my pink and red cremes, and partially by my current obsession with making my own nail decals.

I think I succeeded. I have 3 red polishes 2, pink polishes, 1 grey polish, lots of stamping decals (ok, so I tried it first on a plastic bag and it FAILED), and a huge mess to clean up.

I started off with a sugarspun gradient on most of my nails. Now, I do love sugarspun nails, but I keep forgetting how hard it is to get the gooeyness (that is a technical term) of the polish just right…and how darn long it takes to clean up all the polish on your cuticles! It took me maybe 25 minutes to do…and a full hour to clean. I then tried to make pink and red swirly decals (so I didn’t have to swirl them on my nails)…and it didn’t work on a plastic bag. Well, I had so much luck last week making the I *heart* You manicure, that I thought I would just try painting directly on my stamper. Success!

It is SO MUCH easier to get things off of a squishy rubber stamper than plastic! Oy! The only problem is you have to go one finger at a time, or prepare in advance. Or both.

The hearts were ALSO made on the stamper…I just stamped single hearts from BM-317 and colored them in. Because no, I cannot freehand hearts on my nails. I tried. It was not pretty.

Colors

Dark red: OPI – Visions of Love

Red: OPI – All I Want For Christmas (Is OPI)

Light red: Pure Ice – Siren

Dark pink: Essie – Sunday Funday

Coral pink: L’oreal – Orange You Jealous?

Grey: Maybelline – Bare Escape

I thought these nails were going to be a fail. I am so proud of myself! 🙂 Hope you enjoyed!

This was created using only polishes from the Darling Diva Diamond collection. All of them are wonderfully opaque…but it turns out some of them dry too fast to stamp well! I don’t know how I had such success stamping with Chocolate Diamond, because Pink Diamond and Rose Diamond were a headache.

My base is one coat (yes, one!) of Diamond or Rose Diamond. I have to say, Diamond is pretty but not unique among silver faintly holographic polishes…but Rose Diamond is beautiful. A deep berry pink that glows. Love.

I then tried to stamp with Pink Diamond (a light pink polish)…and it half worked. I ended up going in and adding dots by hand. I then tried to stamp through the middle with Rose Diamond, and it was having none of it. Most of what you see is free-hand, which I was hoping to not have to deal with since I was using my left hand and it was past midnight! Argh. Polish woes.

I’m actually proudest of my thumb…somehow, I made a perfect heart using my left hand AND managed to outline it with tiny beads!

There will be more holiday manicures, and they will be better. I hope. I need to find a way to stamp with these polishes though, they are just so perfect! Other than apparently drying TOO fast! Who knew, that would be an issue?